Ignatius of Loyola

NAME Ignatius of Loyola, born Íñigo López de Loyola. It remains unclear exactly when he transitioned from his baptismal name "Íñigo" to "Ignatius," though he adopted "de Loyola" in reference to his ancestral village. 

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Ignatius was a Spanish nobleman and soldier who, after a dramatic religious conversion, founded the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). He is renowned for creating the Spiritual Exercises, a foundational manual for Christian meditation, and for organizing the Jesuit order with military-like discipline to serve as "Knights in the Service of Jesus."

BIRTH October 23, 1491, at the castle of Loyola in the municipality of Azpeitia, in the Basque region of what is now northern Spain. (1) 

FAMILY BACKGROUND Ignatius came from a minor Basque noble family, the clan of Oñaz y Loyola. 

His father was Don Beltrán Ibáñez de Oñaz y Loyola and his mother was Doña Marina Sáenz de Licona y Balda; both were of noble rank and involved in the turbulent Basque wars of the bands. 

The family's manor house had been demolished on the orders of the King of Castile in 1456 for their depredations, and his paternal grandfather had been temporarily exiled to Andalusia by King Henry IV. 

Ignatius was the youngest of thirteen children. (2)

CHILDHOOD Ignatius's mother died shortly after his birth, and he was raised by María de Garín, the wife of the local blacksmith, who served as his foster mother. 

He spent his early teens mostly at Casa Torre, taking lessons from the village priest. At sixteen he was sent as a page into the household of Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar, a family relative and treasurer of Castile, where he learned to sing, dance, and play musical instruments — skills he retained throughout his life. (3) 

His father had him tonsured (a traditional mark of a possible future in the Church), though Ignatius ultimately gravitated towards military life. 

EDUCATION As a page at the court of Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar, Ignatius received an education in courtly arts — dancing, fencing, music — but little formal schooling. (3) 

After his spiritual conversion, at the age of thirty-three, he returned to studying, attending a free public grammar school in Barcelona and then the University of Alcalá (1526–1527), studying theology and Latin. 

In 1528 he entered the University of Paris, where he remained for over seven years, completing a Magisterium (the equivalent of a master's degree) in 1535 at the age of forty-three; in later life he was commonly addressed as "Master Ignatius."

CAREER RECORD 1506 Became a page in the service of Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar, where he led a dissipated life as a courtier, fond of dueling and chasing women. 

1509 Took up arms for Antonio Manrique de Lara, Duke of Nájera and Viceroy of Navarre, participating in various military engagements.

1521 His military career ended at the Battle of Pamplona when a cannonball shattered his leg, leading to his convalescence and religious conversion. 

1534 Formed a fraternity with six fellow students at the University of Paris, taking vows of poverty and chastity. 

1541 Became the first Superior General of the Jesuits, a position he held until his death, overseeing the establishment of schools and global missionary work.

APPEARANCE Ignatius stood just under five feet two inches tall. (4) 

In his youth he had an abundance of reddish-tinged hair; in later life he became bald, with a high forehead. In later life, after his years of severe austerity, his face was described as emaciated, with an olive complexion, a large forehead, and "brilliant and small eyes." (5) 

Despite his permanent limp from his war wound, he carried himself so well that the lameness was said to be hardly noticeable. (5)

Ignatius Loyola by Anonymous

FASHION  In his youth Ignatius was notably vain about his appearance. A contemporary wrote: "He is in the habit of going around in cuirass and coat of mail, wears his hair long to the shoulder, and walks around in a two-colored, slashed doublet with a bright cap." (6) 

After his conversion this changed completely: at Montserrat he gave away his fine clothes to the poor and donned a rough garment of sackcloth. 

During his months at Manresa he cut neither hair nor nails and took no care of his appearance whatsoever. (7) 

The Inquisition at one point advised Ignatius and his companions to dress less extraordinarily and to wear shoes. (5)

CHARACTER By his own admission, the young Ignatius was "a man given to the vanities of the world, whose chief delight consisted in martial exercises, with a great and vain desire to win renown." (3) 

After his conversion he brought these same qualities of drive and discipline to bear on spiritual life, and became noted for great self-control. (5) 

He was charismatic and warm in his personal relationships, especially with women, and remained deeply engaged in the ordinary details of people's lives even as Superior General. (8)

SPEAKING VOICE His letters and the accounts of companions suggest he was persuasive and quietly intense in conversation rather than a fiery orator; his method was characteristically one-to-one spiritual direction rather than public preaching. (8)

SENSE OF HUMOUR His letters reveal a man capable of warmth, gentle irony, and engagement with the mundane details of life — what one scholar called engagement in the "quotidian mysteries" of every day. (8)

RELATIONSHIPS In his youth Ignatius was a confessed womaniser. He was described as "a womanizer" in one biography and admitted to dreams about an unnamed noblewoman whom he longed to serve and impress — though he never revealed her identity. (9) 

After his conversion he radically redirected his relationships. He maintained warm ties with a wide network of women throughout his life — including wealthy patrons such as Isabel Roser, who supported him financially in the 1520s — though his tumultuous relationship with Roser later led to a bitter rupture and eventual reconciliation. (8) 

As an old man in Rome he was known to escort prostitutes through the streets to protect them from their masters. (8) 

His six companions and co-founders of the Jesuits — among them Francis Xavier and Peter Faber — were his closest associates and formed a band of deep spiritual brotherhood. 

Ignatius and his six companions by Gemini

MONEY AND FAME Born into a minor noble family with some means, Ignatius in his youth aspired to chivalric glory and worldly renown. (3) 

After his conversion he embraced radical poverty, begging for food during his year at Manresa. 

As founder and Superior General of the Jesuits, Ignatius became one of the most prominent religious figures in Europe, though he lived simply and austerely in Rome until his death, devoting his energies to administration and writing. 

FOOD AND DRINK During his period of severe penitence at Manresa, Ignatius ate and drank very sparingly, fasted frequently, and reduced his diet to begged scraps. This extended asceticism damaged his health significantly. (3)

In later life, while administering the Jesuits from Rome, he lived frugally but without the extreme mortifications of his earlier years. No records of any particular food preferences survive. 

MUSIC AND ARTS As a young courtier, Ignatius learned to sing, dance, and play musical instruments at the household of Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar. In later life he retained a love of music, especially sacred hymns. (3) 

He also enjoyed dancing as a young man, described by one biographer as "an expert dancer." 

LITERATURE In his youth Ignatius was an avid reader of romances of chivalry — the stories of El Cid, the knights of Camelot, The Song of Roland, and Amadís de Gaula — which shaped his ideals of heroism and honour. (5) 

During his convalescence, his sister-in-law Magdalena de Araoz gave him De Vita Christi by Ludolph of Saxony (a life of Christ) and a book of saints' lives; Ludolph's work in particular transformed his thinking and directly inspired the meditative method in the Spiritual Exercises. (

Ignatius himself became a prolific writer of letters — some 7,000 survive — as well as the author of the Spiritual Exercises (printed 1548) and, with his secretary Juan Alfonso de Polanco, the Jesuit Constitutions (1553). 

A page from Spiritual Exercises By Doug Coldwell - Flickr:

NATURE During his year of penance and prayer at Manresa, Ignatius spent long periods in a cave outside the town, and described experiencing profound spiritual visions in this wild setting. 

He made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1523, longing to walk where Christ had walked. 

Otherwise Ignatius's life was spent largely in towns and institutions; no particular relationship with nature or the natural world beyond these spiritual associations is recorded.

PETS His nomadic and later monastic lifestyle left little room for animal companions.

HOBBIES AND SPORTS In his youth Ignatius was passionate about martial exercises — fencing, jousting, and swordsmanship — as well as dancing and gambling. After his conversion these were entirely replaced by prayer, study, and administration. During his months at Manresa he prayed for seven hours a day. 

SCIENCE AND MATHS He insisted that Jesuit priests be well-versed in the sciences. This led to the Jesuits becoming some of the leading astronomers and mathematicians of the 16th and 17th centuries.

CONVERSION Ignatius’s conversion did not begin with a choir of angels, or even a particularly thoughtful sermon. It began, rather more efficiently, with a cannonball.

On May 20, 1521, at the Battle of Pamplona, Ignatius of Loyola was doing his level best to be a heroic soldier when a French shot rearranged his right leg and, with it, his entire life plan. He was carried back to the family castle at Loyola, where the doctors did what doctors often did in the 16th century: tried something, frowned, and then tried something worse. The bone was badly set, re-broken without anaesthetic (which does rather focus the mind), and then—because Ignatius was still, at heart, a vain young man—adjusted again so it would look better in tights. It is comforting, in a way, to know that even future saints can be deeply concerned about their calves.

While recovering, he asked for his usual reading—romantic tales of knights, glory, and impressing women—but the house contained nothing of the sort. Instead, he was handed a life of Christ and a book of saints. This was, from his perspective, roughly equivalent to ordering an exciting novel and being given a set of instruction manuals. He read them anyway, partly from boredom, and began to notice something odd. Daydreams about chivalric heroics left him briefly thrilled and then strangely hollow, like eating too many pastries. Thoughts of imitating saints—people who, frankly, sounded exhausting—left him with a quieter, more durable sense of peace.

This was not, perhaps, the most dramatic revelation in history, but it was a significant one: different thoughts leave different aftertastes. Ignatius, being thorough, paid attention. In time, he would turn this simple observation into what became known as the “discernment of spirits,” which sounds complicated but is essentially the spiritual equivalent of noticing which foods give you indigestion.

In 1522, aged 31 and presumably still walking a little carefully, he set out as a pilgrim. On the road he encountered a Moor who disagreed with him about the Virgin Mary, and Ignatius found himself wondering whether honour required him to kill the man. Unable to decide, he entrusted the matter to his mule, which chose a path leading safely away from violence. It is difficult not to feel that this was one of the more sensible decisions made by a donkey in the history of theology.

At the monastery of Montserrat, Ignatius made a full confession and then, in a gesture lifted straight from the romances he had been forced to give up, laid down his sword and dagger before a statue of the Virgin. He exchanged his fine clothes for sackcloth and kept an all-night vigil, which is the sort of thing that sounds deeply spiritual until you try staying awake past midnight without snacks.

He then moved on to Manresa, intending a short stop. He stayed nearly a year. There, in a cave, he prayed for hours, fasted severely, neglected basic grooming, and generally attempted to become holier through sheer effort. This did not go entirely well. At one point, his practices were so extreme that they seemed driven less by love of God and more by a desire to outdo every saint who had ever lived—an ambition which, while admirable in its way, is not always the most restful path to enlightenment.

Manresa, Chapel in the Cave of Saint Ignatius where Ignatius practiced asceticism by PMRMaeyaert 

Gradually, however, something shifted. The intensity softened into something deeper and quieter. He experienced moments of profound clarity, including a famous insight by the River Cardoner, where he felt he understood more about spiritual things in a single instant than in all his previous years. He also began drafting what would become the Spiritual Exercises—a kind of training manual for the soul, though with fewer diagrams and rather more silence.

In 1523, Ignatius finally reached Jerusalem, having walked much of the way barefoot, which suggests a level of commitment most of us reserve for slightly less ambitious activities. He hoped to stay, but the authorities—quite reasonably—sent him home for his own safety. It was, by any normal standard, a failure. Ignatius, however, treated it as redirection. If he was to be useful, he decided, he would need an education.

Years later, in 1537, as he travelled to Rome, he stopped to pray at La Storta and experienced a vision that confirmed, in his mind, that his strange new path was not entirely self-invented. By then, the soldier who had once dreamed of glory and romance had become something else entirely—still intense, still determined, but now pointed in a different direction.

Which only goes to show that sometimes, when your plans are shattered—quite literally—it may not be the end of the story. It may simply be the moment when a better one, slightly less dependent on good legs and impressive trousers, begins.

FOUNDATION OF THE JESUIT ORDER If you ever wanted proof that God has a curious sense of humour, you could do worse than consider Society of Jesus—founded by a man who started out wanting to be a heroic soldier and ended up inventing a spiritual boot camp instead.

It all began when Ignatius of Loyola was shot during the Battle of Pamplona in 1521. Confined to bed with nothing to read except religious books—an early and particularly forceful form of divine hint—he decided that if he was going to serve anyone, it might as well be God, and he would do it with the same slightly alarming level of enthusiasm he’d previously reserved for waving swords about. Unsurprisingly, the military imagery stuck. The founding idea of his new order was essentially: What if holiness, but organised like an army?

A few years later, at the University of Paris, Ignatius gathered a small band of friends, including Francis Xavier and Peter Faber—men who clearly hadn’t yet realised what they were getting into. By 1534 there were seven of them altogether, and on August 15 they met in a crypt at Montmartre (because nothing says “new beginning” like a slightly damp underground room) and took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. They also promised to go to Jerusalem—always a fine plan until it isn’t—and sensibly added a clause that if that failed, they’d go wherever the Pope sent them, which turned out to be more or less everywhere.

When they arrived in Rome, Pope Paul III gave them his blessing, and by 1540 he had formalised the arrangement with the splendidly martial bull Regimini militantis Ecclesiae (“Rules for the Fighting Church,” which sounds less like a prayer group and more like a recruitment poster). Thus the Jesuits were officially in business.

Fresco depicting Ignatius of Loyola receiving papal bull Regimini militantis Ecclesiae from Pope Paul III

Ignatius was elected the first Superior General in 1541—a title which sounds modest until you realise it came with lifelong tenure and a requirement that everyone obey you completely. To keep things balanced, he appointed an “Admonitor,” whose job was essentially to say, “Are you quite sure that’s a good idea?”—a role that probably saved a great many headaches. Jesuits also took a special fourth vow of obedience to the Pope, which, during the theological turbulence of the Reformation, was rather like volunteering to stand exactly where the fireworks were being set off.

Ignatius then wrote the rulebook—literally. With the help of Juan Alfonso de Polanco, he produced the Constitutions, a document stressing discipline, humility, and the memorable phrase perinde ac cadaver (“like a corpse”), meaning one should be entirely free of self-will. It’s not the most cheerful image, but it does get the point across. More attractively, the Jesuit motto became Ad maiorem Dei gloriam—“For the greater glory of God,” or AMDG, which is much easier to write on a school exercise book.

And then, rather inconveniently for anyone who prefers things to stay small and manageable, the whole enterprise took off. Francis Xavier went as far as India and Japan, others spread across Europe founding schools and colleges, and before long the Jesuits had become the intellectual spearhead of the Counter-Reformation—essentially fighting Protestantism with education, argument, and an alarming amount of energy.

By the time Ignatius died in 1556, there were about a thousand Jesuits scattered across four continents, which is impressive for a movement that began in a Paris crypt with seven men and a plan that may or may not have involved Jerusalem.

Centuries later, the order is still going strong. In fact, when Pope Francis was elected in 2013, he became the first Jesuit pope—proof, if any were needed, that once you start an army for God, it can end up running rather further than you expected.

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY  Ignatius's central theological contribution was his system of discernment — the idea that an individual can learn to distinguish between spiritual consolation (from God) and desolation (a distraction or temptation), and thereby find God's will in their own experience. This method, known as "Ignatian spirituality," was codified in the Spiritual Exercises, a structured programme of meditations, prayers, and examinations of conscience designed to be carried out over 28–30 days. In drafting it, he drew on the Exercises for the Spiritual Life by the Spanish abbot García de Cisneros. (1) 

The overarching motto of the Jesuit order he founded was Ad maiorem Dei gloriam ("For the greater glory of God"), while the constitutions he wrote demanded of members absolute obedience, summarised in the phrase perinde ac cadaver — "as if a dead body." 

POLITICS Ignatius operated entirely within the structures of the Catholic Church and the Spanish Crown. He had served as a soldier of the Spanish state under the Duke of Nájera and later sought and gained papal patronage for his order from Pope Paul III. (1) 

The fourth vow he instituted for Jesuits — obedience directly to the Pope on matters of mission — was a deliberate political as well as spiritual act, binding the Society of Jesus closely to papal authority during the turbulent years of the Reformation. 

As Superior General he also intervened in delicate court diplomacy, including mediating in a marital quarrel involving the family of Emperor Charles V. (8)

SCANDAL In his youth Ignatius was involved in violent crimes at carnival time, reportedly using his status as a member of a clerical household to escape prosecution.

In the mid-1520s he was imprisoned twice by the Spanish Inquisition — once at Alcalá and once at Salamanca — on suspicion of heresy, due to his street-corner preaching and his habit of leading groups of devout women in spiritual exercises without the necessary theological qualifications. He was released both times without formal charges. (1)

MILITARY RECORD Ignatius served under Antonio Manrique de Lara, Duke of Nájera and Viceroy of Navarre, from 1509 onwards, participating in many battles. His most celebrated military moment was the Battle of Pamplona on May 20, 1521, when he refused to surrender to a vastly superior French force. A cannonball fractured his right leg; after the battle, so admired was his bravery that the French allowed him to be carried back to Loyola. However, the injury ended his military career.(1) 

Ignatius in his armour, in a 16th-century painting

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS As a young man Ignatius was physically vigorous and athletic, a keen swordsman, dancer, and soldier. 

After a cannonball fractured his right leg his surgeons botched the repair, and he had to endure the bone being broken and reset without anaesthetic — an operation that left his right leg permanently shorter than the other, giving him a lifelong limp. (1) 

His extreme physical austerities at Manresa — fasting, sleep deprivation, self-flagellation, seven hours of daily prayer — severely damaged his health; by the 1540s Ignatius suffered from persistent stomach and abdominal complaints. 

An autopsy after his death revealed a body riddled with kidney and bladder stones, gallstones, and other pathologies suggesting years of chronic illness; one anatomist present recorded finding stones "in the kidneys, in the lungs, in the liver, and in the portal vein." (9)

HOMES Ignatius was born and raised at the ancestral castle of Loyola in Azpeitia, Basque Country. After his conversion he was effectively homeless for several years, begging his way through Manresa and Barcelona. 

He studied in Paris from 1528, living in college accommodation, first at the austere Collège de Montaigu and then at the Collège Sainte-Barbe. 

From 1537 he was based largely in Rome, eventually settling there permanently as Superior General, living simply in rooms at the Jesuit headquarters. 

TRAVEL Ignatius was an inveterate traveller. He journeyed from the Basque Country to Montserrat and Manresa in Catalonia after his conversion. 

In 1523 he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. 

He traveled extensively across Spain for his studies at Alcalá and Salamanca, before moving to Paris in 1528. 

In 1537 the nascent Jesuit group traveled overland to Italy to seek papal approval. 

As Superior General he dispatched missionaries to Brazil, India, and Japan, famously writing to Francis Xavier: "Ite, inflammate omnia" — "Go, set the world on fire." 

DEATH Ignatius died in Rome on July 31, 1556, most probably of "Roman Fever" — a severe form of malaria endemic in the city. His death came so suddenly that he had no time to receive the last rites. At the time of his death there were 110 Jesuit houses and some 1,000 missionaries working on four continents. (1) 

He was beatified by Pope Paul V on July 27, 1609, and canonised by Pope Gregory XV on March 12, 1622. 

His feast day is celebrated annually on July 31. He is venerated as patron saint of the Basque provinces of Gipuzkoa and Biscay, Catholic soldiers, and — since 1922 — all spiritual retreats. (2)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA In 1949 Ignatius was the subject of a Spanish biographical film, Loyola, the Soldier Saint, starring Rafael Durán in the title role. 

In 2016 a Filipino film, Ignacio de Loyola, depicted his life, with Andreas Muñoz in the lead role. 

Ignatius also features as a character in countless literary and dramatic works dealing with the Counter-Reformation and the founding of the Jesuits, and his image — based in part on the famous portrait by Peter Paul Rubens — is reproduced widely across Catholic institutions worldwide. (2)

Ignatius portrait by Peter Paul Rubens

ACHIEVEMENTS Founded the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1534, formally chartered by Pope Paul III on September 27, 1540 — one of the most influential religious orders in history, instrumental in the Counter-Reformation.

Elected the first Superior General of the Jesuits on April 19, 1541, overseeing rapid global expansion to 110 houses and 1,000 missionaries by the time of his death. 

Wrote the Spiritual Exercises (printed 1548), a foundational text of Christian spiritual direction, still widely used today. 

Co-authored the Jesuit Constitutions (1553), creating a highly organised, centralised religious order modelled — as a former soldier — on military discipline. 

Established numerous schools, colleges, and seminaries, laying the groundwork for an educational network that today includes over 200 Jesuit universities worldwide. 

Canonised as Saint Ignatius of Loyola on March 12, 1622; declared patron of all spiritual retreats by Pope Pius XI in 1922.

Sources: (1) Encyclopaedia of Trivia (2) Wikipedia (3) EBSCO Research Starters (4) ChurchPop (5) Theodora Encyclopedia (6) America Magazine (7) Jesuit.org.uk (8) El Ignaciano (9) National Library of Medicine

Henrik Ibsen

NAME Henrik Johan Ibsen. 

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Henrik Ibsen was a towering Norwegian dramatist and poet, widely hailed as the "Father of Modern Drama" and "Norway’s Shakespeare." He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after William Shakespeare. Ibsen is the creator of the modern realist prose drama, most notably A Doll's House (1879), which provoked a major literary controversy by depicting a woman's rebellion against and final breaking away from the "man-made" society in which she is confined.

BIRTH  Born March 20, 1828, in the prosperous port town of Skien, in the county of Bratsberg (Telemark), Norway.  He was baptised at home in the Lutheran state church — membership of which was mandatory — on March 28, with the baptism confirmed in Christian's Church on June 19. (1)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Ibsen was born into an affluent merchant family and had strong family ties to the Paus family and other families who had held power and wealth in Telemark since the mid-1500s. 

 His father, Knud Plesner Ibsen (1797–1877), was a wealthy merchant in Skien, the city's 16th largest taxpayer in 1833.  His mother, Marichen Cornelia Martine Altenburg (1799–1869), grew up in the stately Altenburg House in the centre of Skien; her father was a shipowner, timber merchant, and liquor distillery owner. 

Ibsen's parents, Knud and Marichen, grew up as close relatives — sometimes referred to as "near-siblings" — both belonging to the tightly intertwined Paus family.  Ibsen himself wrote that "my parents were members on both sides of the most respected families in Skien," and that he was closely related to "just about all the patrician families who then dominated the place and its surroundings." 

Ibsen had Danish, German, Norwegian, and some distant Scottish ancestry; most of his ancestors belonged to the merchant class of original Danish and German extraction, and many were ship's captains. 

When Ibsen was around seven years old, his father's fortunes took a turn for the worse; in 1835, the family was forced to sell their townhouse, and the following year they moved to their stately summer home and farm, Venstøp, outside the city. 

Venstøp outside Skien, Ibsen's family's farm

Modern scholarship has refuted the older romanticised narrative of the Ibsens plunging into ruin, noting that the family maintained four servants, continued to socialise with the Skien elite, and that young Henrik had a happy and comfortable upper-class childhood even after the move to Venstøp. 

CHILDHOOD In his unfinished autobiography From Skien to Rome, Ibsen described his childhood Skien as "an extremely joyful and festive town" full of "balls, dinner parties, and musical soirées." 

 Those who knew Henrik as a child described him as "a boy who was pampered by his father, who enjoyed being creative in solitude, and who provoked peers with his superiority and arrogance." (1) 

He was more introverted than his sociable father and engaged enthusiastically in model theatre, a pastime popular among bourgeois boys in early 19th-century Europe. 

One childhood neighbour described him bluntly: "He was immensely cunning and malicious, and he even beat us. But when he grew up, he became incredibly handsome, yet no one liked him because he was so malicious." (1)

EDUCATION At the age of fifteen, Ibsen left school and moved to the small town of Grimstad, where he worked as an apothecary's apprentice while studying nights for admission to the university. (2) 

He travelled to Christiania (later Oslo) intending to matriculate at the university but his earlier attempts were blocked when he failed to pass all his entrance exams — including his medical examinations — and he ultimately rejected academic study in favour of writing.  (3)

CAREER RECORD 1850 Ibsen published his first play, the tragedy Catiline, under the pseudonym Brynjolf Bjarme. 

1851-1857 He worked as a writer and stage manager at the Det norske Theater in Bergen, where he was involved in the production of over 145 plays. 

1858 He returned to Christiania to become the creative director of the Christiania Theatre. 

1864 Distressed by Norway's political climate, he began a 27-year period of self-imposed exile, living primarily in Italy and Germany. 

1867 He achieved international fame with the dramatic poem Peer Gynt. (

1879 December 21, 1879, The world première of A Doll's House took place at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark. 

1893 January 19, 1893, His play The Master Builder received its premiere performance in Berlin.

APPEARANCE Ibsen was short but firmly and well built, so that he looked taller than he was. He had a powerful forehead, described as "remarkably broad and high, a very Jupiter's brow," and a delicate, thin-lipped mouth that "shuts energetically in a fine line," expressing "inexhaustible will, as though some giant resolve were forever being taken afresh." (4) 

In later years he had piercing, pale eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles, and bushy iron-grey — later snowy white — whiskers and a flowing mane of hair. He moved very slowly and noiselessly, with his hands behind his back. (5) 

One female admirer, Rikke Holst, said his appearance was "more interesting than actually handsome." (6) 

Ibsen was very unhappy with his appearance and had a small mirror glued inside his hat so he could check how he looked. (3)

One of the oldest photographs of Ibsen from ca. 1863/64,

FASHION Despite his unprepossessing physical appearance, Ibsen became a notable dandy. Even in the Alpine villages where he summered, he was recalled wearing "a black velvet coat with decorations and ribbons, the blindingly white linen, the elaborately knotted necktie, the very correct black top hat, those discreet gestures, that reserved manner." (7) 

In his early Bergen years, the regular salary he finally earned was spent, among other things, on elegant black overcoats and tan lambskin gloves. (6) 

As he walked to banquets in Christiania in later life, he wore a long, tightly-buttoned black overcoat, beneath which he displayed an array of crosses, stars, and belts. (5) 

It was said that "a change came over his appearance and manner after the publication of Brand — that he then put off the Bohemian and put on the reserved, correct, punctilious man-of-the-world." (8)

CHARACTER Ibsen was shy, introverted, and famously reserved. (6) 

Those who knew him in childhood described him as "cunning" and prone to arrogance, and this condescension towards others — and towards common Norwegian farmers in particular — was a characteristic he retained throughout his life. 

He regarded himself as "a lone franc tireur in the outposts," playing a lone hand and observing society with detached, iconoclastic objectivity. (2) 

SPEAKING VOICE Ibsen was known as a man of few words in company. His writings, however, are celebrated for their ruthless economy of dialogue — every line carrying devastating, precise meaning — and contemporaries noted that in person he could be terse to the point of rudeness, though capable of bursts of animated conversation on literary subjects. (2)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Ibsen's humour tended to be dry, sardonic, and often dark. His play Love's Comedy (1862), a satire on romantic illusions, was violently unpopular with audiences — perhaps because the joke was too close to the bone. (2) 

RELATIONSHIPS In 1846, while working as an apothecary's apprentice in Grimstad, the eighteen-year-old Ibsen fathered a son, Hans Jacob Hendrichsen Birkdalen, by a maid named Else Sophie Jensdatter Birkedalen. Ibsen paid for the boy's upbringing until he was fourteen but never met his illegitimate son. 

 He married Suzannah Daae Thoresen on June 18, 1858; she gave birth to their only legitimate child, Sigurd, on December 23, 1859.

Suzannah was beautiful, strong-minded, and highly intelligent; Ibsen nicknamed her "the eagle" (and also "the cat"). (9) 

Suzannah encouraged the publication of his work and was a full intellectual partner in the marriage. The couple were known to argue frequently, though the letters that survived after her attempts to burn their correspondence are very affectionate. (10) 

Ibsen remained married to Suzannah until his death — 48 years in total — yet he was famously fascinated by young women throughout his life. He flirted and corresponded intensely with several, including the young pianist Hildur Andersen, and found in them a source of creative inspiration. It is generally believed, however, that he was never physically unfaithful to Suzannah, always returning to her. (6) 

Suzannah Ibsen

His son Sigurd Ibsen became a lawyer, government minister, and Prime Minister of Norway. 

MONEY AND FAME Ibsen spent most of his early career in serious financial difficulty, borrowing money, sinking into debt, and suffering bouts of severe depression about his circumstances. (9) 

A turning point came in 1866, when he received an annual poet's stipend from the Norwegian government and royalties from Brand secured his financial position; he was soon earning more than university professors. (11) 

With the international success of A Doll's House in 1879, Ibsen achieved true global fame — his plays translated into German, French, and English and performed across Europe and in America.

He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902, 1903, and 1904, though he never won it. 

FOOD AND DRINK Ibsen was known to enjoy a drink. He was a familiar figure in his later years at his usual café table in Christiania, where he would sit alone, nursing a glass of beer or aquavit. (7) 

MUSIC AND ARTS Ibsen's childhood home in Skien was full of cultural life — balls, soirées, and musical gatherings — and he grew up in a world that valued artistic refinement.

Ibsen's mother, Marichen Altenburg, was a painter, and the young Henrik showed an early interest in becoming an artist like her. 

Music played a significant role in his work's legacy: in 1876, Ibsen asked the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg to write incidental music for the stage première of Peer Gynt. Grieg was not particularly keen at first, but as he began getting ideas down on paper it became increasingly clear that this was the masterwork he had struggled so long to achieve. He eventually composed 90 minutes of music to accompany Ibsen's dramatic masterpiece, including the celebrated "Morning Mood." (13) 

DRAMAS If you were to map out the career of Henrik Ibsen on a neat timeline—as one imagines librarians in sensible shoes have attempted—you’d find it divides itself rather obligingly into three acts. This is convenient, because Ibsen himself spent nearly 50 years perfecting the idea that life rarely does.

Act I: The Apprenticeship (1850–1873) Ibsen’s career began in 1850 with Catiline, published under the splendidly unhelpful pseudonym “Brynjolf Bjarme,” which sounds less like a writer and more like a man you’d avoid sitting next to at a Nordic banquet. His first staged play, The Burial Mound, arrived the same year and made approximately the amount of noise one might expect from a burial mound.

At 23, he was handed the formidable job of running the Det norske Theater in Bergen, where he was required to produce a new play annually—rather like being told to bake a wedding cake every week whether or not anyone was getting married. He churned out historical verse dramas such as Lady Inger of Ostrat (1855), The Feast at Solhaug (1856), and The Vikings at Helgeland (1858). These works did not exactly set the box office ablaze, but they did give him the sort of practical theatre experience that can only be acquired by watching audiences not applaud.

A move to Christiania (now Oslo) in 1857 brought him to the helm of the Christiania Theatre, which obligingly went bankrupt in 1863—never a confidence booster. At this point, Ibsen did what many sensible people do when their career stalls: he left the country entirely. In 1864, he decamped to Rome for what became a 27-year exile, presumably reasoning that if Norway wouldn’t appreciate him, perhaps Italy—with better weather—might.

It worked. In Italy, he wrote Brand (1866), a stern verse drama about uncompromising idealism that made him famous almost overnight (a phenomenon that tends to occur after about 15 years of obscurity). He followed it with Peer Gynt (1867), a wildly imaginative epic that has since become one of his most beloved works, though it’s fair to say it contains more trolls than most modern audiences are prepared for without Wi-Fi.

Act II: The Great Social Dramas (1877–1882) Having spent years mastering verse, Ibsen abruptly abandoned it—rather like a man training for a marathon only to take up fencing—and reinvented himself as the father of modern realist drama.

He began with Pillars of Society (1877), then detonated European sensibilities with A Doll’s House (1879), which premiered in Copenhagen and caused what can only be described as a theatrical scandal of Olympic proportions. The idea that a married woman might leave her husband and children was, at the time, considered less a plot twist and more a societal emergency.

If that wasn’t enough, Ibsen followed up with Ghosts (1881), a play featuring inherited disease and moral hypocrisy—topics guaranteed to clear a Victorian drawing room faster than a fire alarm. Many theatres refused to stage it for two decades, which is one way of ensuring a work’s notoriety. Then came An Enemy of the People (1882), in which a lone truth-teller is crushed by public opinion—a plot that has aged with unsettling grace.

Act III: The Psychological Deep Dive (1884–1899) In his later years, Ibsen turned inward, swapping public scandal for private torment. The plays became more psychological, more symbolic, and, in many cases, more unsettling.

The Wild Duck (1884) is often cited as his finest work, while Rosmersholm (1886) and Hedda Gabler (1890) explore the sort of emotional claustrophobia that makes you grateful for fresh air and uncomplicated friendships. Hedda herself remains one of theatre’s most formidable creations—a character who could likely silence a room simply by entering it.

Later works like The Master Builder (1892) continue this fascination with ambition, regret, and the inconvenient persistence of the past. His final play, When We Dead Awaken (1899), was described by Ibsen as an epilogue to his entire body of work—a reflective, slightly ominous curtain call on a career spent dissecting human frailty with surgical precision.

Legacy Today, Ibsen is widely regarded as the founder of modern drama and, rather impressively, remains the most performed playwright after William Shakespeare—which is rather like coming second only to gravity in a contest of universal forces.

His influence stretches across generations, shaping writers as varied as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, and Arthur Miller—all of whom took one look at Ibsen’s work and thought, in their own way, “Well, that changes things.”

From Catiline in 1850 to When We Dead Awaken in 1899, his 25 plays chart not just the evolution of a writer, but the moment theatre stopped being polite entertainment and started asking extremely uncomfortable questions—often at precisely the wrong moment for everyone involved.

LITERATURE His major literary influences included the Norwegian poet Henrik Wergeland, Danish writers such as Meïr Aron Goldschmidt and Georg Brandes, and the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (particularly evident in Brand and Peer Gynt). 

Critics frequently rate The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm as Ibsen's finest works, though Ibsen himself always insisted his masterpiece was Emperor and Galilean. 

NATURE Ibsen spent summers in Alpine villages and the Norwegian landscape — the fjords, mountains, and dark forests of his homeland — is woven through his work, most famously in Peer Gynt and Brand. (7) 

He drew on the wild terrain of Norway as a metaphor for the extremes of human psychology and morality throughout his career. (2)

PETS While living in Rome in 1865 and writing Brand, Ibsen kept a scorpion in a beer glass on his desk as a writing companion. He wrote about it himself: "From time to time the brute would ail. Then I would throw a piece of ripe fruit in to it, on which it would cast itself in a rage and inject its poison into it; then it was well again." The scorpion's diet of fruit rather than its natural prey of insects meant it wasn't particularly healthy, and it's not known how long it survived under his care. (14)

Image by Gemini

HOBBIES AND SPORTS In childhood, Ibsen was particularly devoted to model theatre — the popular bourgeois pastime of constructing miniature stage sets and performing plays with small figures. 

In his mature years, his main recreational habit was his daily walk and his solitary ritual of sitting at a café table, reading the papers and watching the world go by. (7) 

He was also an avid painter of watercolours as a young man, a talent he inherited from his mother. (12)

SCIENCE AND MATHS Ibsen had ambitions of becoming a doctor and studied for his medical entrance examinations in Grimstad and Christiania, but failed to pass all the required subjects. (3) 

This personal failure fed his fascination with medicine as a narrative device: the physician hero of An Enemy of the People (1882), who discovers the local baths are contaminated and is persecuted for telling the truth, is one of his most vivid characters. (2)

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Ibsen was a lifelong sceptic who rejected organised religion as an impediment to individual freedom and social reform.  He was strongly influenced by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, particularly Kierkegaard's concepts of authentic selfhood and the radical demands of the ideal — themes he explored most powerfully in Brand. 

POLITICS Ibsen positioned himself as a political outsider. He wrote that he felt like "a lone franc tireur in the outposts," refusing to join either conservative or liberal factions.  He was deeply critical of democracy's tendency toward conformism and majority tyranny — a theme powerfully dramatised in An Enemy of the People (1882). (2) 

His works are strongly identified with the humanist and feminist social movements of the late 19th century, challenging the marital and social roles assigned to women — though he insisted his commitment to women's rights was part of a broader commitment to humanism, to "lift up humanity to a higher plane." 

SCANDAL A Doll's House (1879) caused a literary earthquake across Europe and America: one Christiania hostess even wrote on her party invitations "You are politely requested not to mention Mr Ibsen's new play." (2) 

Cigarette card (c. 1880 – c. 1882) depicting Adeleide Johannessen as Nora Helmer. in The Dolls House

Ghosts (1881), dealing explicitly with inherited syphilis and marital deception, was deemed so scandalous that it took 20 years before the Norwegian authorities would allow it to be performed in Norway. Ibsen was denounced by conventionally minded critics as a Bad Old Man who had "desecrated all that was sacred and holy." (2) 

His illegitimate son, fathered by a maid in 1846, was kept secret; Ibsen paid for the boy's upbringing but never acknowledged or met him. 

MILITARY RECORD Ibsen had no military service. He was rejected for military service in his youth due to his small stature and health issues.

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Despite his sedentary scholarly life in later years, he maintained a daily walking routine and was known for his slow, deliberate physical movements. (5)

In March 1900, Ibsen suffered the first of a series of strokes that left him unable to write and gradually incapacitated him. 

HOMES Born and grew up in Skien, Norway, in the Altenburg House, one of the grandest townhouses in the city, before the family moved to the farm at Venstøp. 

From 1864, he lived for 27 years in self-imposed exile, primarily in Rome, Dresden, and Munich. 

He returned to Christiania (Oslo) in 1891 and spent his final fifteen years there, in an apartment at Arbins gade 1, which has since been preserved as the Ibsen Museum — restored with its original interior, colours, and decor. 

TRAVEL Ibsen left Norway in April 1864 and spent 27 years abroad in Italy and Germany — among the most productive years of his creative life. He visited Rome, Dresden, Munich, and various Alpine summer resorts, and made only two brief return visits to Norway in 1874 and 1885. 

He represented Norway at the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, after receiving a new state grant. (11)

DEATH Ibsen died on May 23, 1906, at his home at Arbins gade 1 in Kristiania (now Oslo), after a series of strokes.  When, on May 22, 1906, his nurse assured a visitor that he was "a little better," Ibsen spluttered his last words: "On the contrary!" ("Tvertimod!"). He died the following day at 2:30 pm. 

He was buried in Vår Frelsers gravlund ("The Graveyard of Our Saviour") in central Oslo. (1)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA The NRK produced a miniseries about Ibsen's childhood and youth in 2006, An Immortal Man, to mark the centenary of his death. 

His plays have been filmed and adapted for television many times across the world. The 100th anniversary of his death in 2006 was commemorated with an "Ibsen Year" in Norway and internationally. 

In 2006 a Peer Gynt Sculpture Park was opened in Oslo in his honour. 

An annual Delhi Ibsen Festival has been held since 2008, organised in collaboration with the Royal Norwegian Embassy in India. 

ACHIEVEMENTS Ibsen pioneered modern theatrical realism and is widely regarded as the most important playwright since Shakespeare. 

His plays — in particular A Doll's House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, and The Wild Duck — transformed European and world drama. 

He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902, 1903, and 1904. 

He was a key figure in Japanese drama and greatly influenced the Shingeki movement. 

Several international prizes are awarded in his name, including the International Ibsen Award. 

1) Wikipedia (2) Britannica (3) Biography.com (4) Scribd – Ibsen physical description (5) Wikisource – Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. 13 (6) Daily Scandinavian (7) New Criterion – "Unpleasant Ibsen" (8) Project Gutenberg – Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. 9 (9) ADH Studio TDS – Biographies (10) Red Tape Theatre – Ibsen's Marriage (11) Famous Poets and Poems – Henrik Ibsen Biography (12) StudySmarter – Henrik Ibsen Biography (13) Encyclopaedia of Trivia – Edvard Grieg (14) Mental Floss

Anne Hutchinson

NAME Anne Hutchinson (born Anne Marbury). She was often referred to as a "Puritan housewife" or "midwife," though to her enemies, she was a "disturber of the peace." 

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Anne Hutchinson was a spiritual leader in colonial Massachusetts who challenged the male-dominated religious and political hierarchy of the Puritan church. She is best known for her role in the Antinomian Controversy, which led to her trial, excommunication, and banishment. Her defiance helped establish the early American principles of freedom of religion and individual conscience.

BIRTH Baptized July 20, 1591, in Alford, Lincolnshire, England. (1), (2)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Anne was born Anne Marbury, the third of fifteen children of Francis Marbury and Bridget Dryden. Her father was an Anglican cleric with strong Puritan leanings who repeatedly clashed with church authorities over his belief that the clergy should be properly educated; he was convicted of heresy and spent two years in Marshalsea Prison before Anne was born. 

Her mother Bridget came from a prominent Northampton family — her brother Erasmus was the grandfather of the poet and playwright John Dryden. (3)

CHILDHOOD Anne spent her first fifteen years in the market town of Alford, Lincolnshire. Her father, who had been imprisoned for his religious dissent, used the transcript of his own public trial as a teaching tool for his children, portraying himself as a hero and the Bishop of London as a buffoon. 

Anne received a far better education than most girls of her era, thanks to her father's strong commitment to learning and his unconventional willingness to teach his daughters. 

In 1605, when Anne was fifteen, the family moved to London, where her father became vicar of St Martin Vintry. (4)

EDUCATION Anne's education was primarily shaped by her father at home, where she was immersed in scripture and Christian doctrine from a young age. Education in Elizabethan England was almost exclusively reserved for boys and men, but Francis Marbury taught his daughters alongside his sons, inspired perhaps by the example of Queen Elizabeth I, who spoke six foreign languages. 

Anne became intimately familiar with the Bible and developed formidable skills in theological argument — skills she would later deploy with devastating effect at her trial. (4)

CAREER RECORD 1634 She emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony with her family to follow her mentor, the minister John Cotton.

1634–1637 Worked as a skilled midwife and nurse, providing medical and spiritual comfort to women. During this time, she began hosting weekly Bible study meetings in her home.

1637 She was brought to civil trial by Governor John Winthrop and the General Court for "traducing the ministers."

1638 Anne Hutchinson was banished from the colony and subsequently excommunicated after a church trial.

1638–1642 She helped found the settlement of Portsmouth in what is now Rhode Island, alongside Roger Williams

APPEARANCE At the time of her civil trial in November 1637, Anne Hutchinson was 46 years old, of average height and bearing, with an unremarkable face. She dressed in Puritan fashion, in plain, dark-coloured clothing with a white collar and a bonnet called a coif, the standard attire of a respectable colonial woman of her class. No portrait of her survives from life. (5) (6)

Anne Hutchinson on Trial by Edwin Austin Abbey 

FASHION As a devout Puritan, Anne would have adhered strictly to the plain dress codes of her faith — dark, modest garments, white collars, and the coif or cap. Part of her religious message was in fact a direct challenge to outward religious performance: she preached that it was not necessary to "look holy" in order to hold deep religious feelings, openly condemning those who sought salvation through "sombre dress, and other outward forms of religious manifestation." (6) (7)

CHARACTER Governor John Winthrop — her chief adversary — described Anne Hutchinson as "a woman of a ready wit and a bold spirit," possessed of "a very voluble tongue, bolder than a man." More admiringly, sources from Rhode Island describe her as "a capable, energetic, and amiable person" with "a vigorous mind, dauntless courage, and a natural gift for leadership." 

Both friends and enemies agreed that she was extraordinarily self-possessed: her biographer Eve LaPlante wrote that she was "confident of herself and her intellectual tools, largely because of the intimacy she felt with God." (7), (8),

SPEAKING VOICE The historical record attests to its persuasive power. At her trial she spoke with such force and precision that the court, loaded as it was against her, struggled for two days to find a convictable charge. Cotton praised her "sharp apprehension, a ready utterance, and ability to express yourself in the cause of God." (5)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Hutchinson's public persona, as recorded by contemporaries, was one of fierce intellectual and spiritual seriousness. Her acerbic dismissal of the Boston church — "I know no such church, neither will I own it. Call it the whore and strumpet of Boston" — suggests a sharp, combative wit rather than a gentle one.

RELATIONSHIPS Anne married William Hutchinson, a fabric merchant and familiar acquaintance from Alford, at St Mary Woolnoth Church in London on August 9, 1612. The marriage appears to have been one of genuine partnership; William gave up his successful mercantile career to follow his wife into exile, and he signed the Portsmouth Compact as one of the founding twenty-three settlers of the new colony. 

Together they had fifteen children, of whom twelve survived early childhood. 

After William's death in 1642, Anne faced the crises of her final year alone, with several of her children still at home. Her brother-in-law, the minister John Wheelwright, was a close theological ally who was banished from the colony alongside her supporters. (3)

MONEY AND FAME William Hutchinson was a prosperous cloth merchant who "brought a considerable estate with him to New England." The family purchased a half-acre lot in downtown Boston and built one of the largest houses on the Shawmut Peninsula — a two-storey timber-frame structure that stood until it was consumed in the great Boston fire of 1711. 

They were also granted Taylor's Island in Boston Harbour and acquired 600 acres at Mount Wollaston. William became a town selectman and deputy to the General Court, giving the family considerable civic standing. 

Historical highway marker for William and Anne Hutchinson property at Mount Wollaston, By Sarnold17

Anne herself achieved a celebrity — or notoriety — unmatched by any woman in the colony, attracting the young governor to her meetings and terrifying the Puritan establishment. (3)

FOOD AND DRINK  As a colonial housewife and midwife, she would have been skilled in brewing small beer and preparing standard New England fare like cornmeal, peas, and salted meats.

MUSIC AND ARTS Puritan culture was deeply suspicious of what it deemed frivolous entertainment; music in Puritan New England was largely confined to unaccompanied psalm-singing in church. 

LITERATURE Anne Hutchinson left no published writings of her own, though transcripts of her two trials — the civil trial of November 1637 and the church trial of March 1638 — survive and constitute a remarkable record of her arguments and rhetoric. 

Her father Francis Marbury, whose influence on her was enormous, left a written transcript of his own heresy trial — a document he used to educate his children. The colony's leading literary figure, John Winthrop, wrote about her extensively in his journal, calling her "the principal cause of all our trouble." (9)

NATURE Anne Hutchinson's connection to the natural world is most powerfully expressed in her journey into exile: after her excommunication in March 1638, she walked for more than six days through April snow from Boston to Roger Williams' settlement at Providence, then took boats across to Aquidneck Island. 

The Hutchinson family grazed their sheep on Taylor's Island in Boston Harbour and held 600 acres of farmland at Mount Wollaston.

PETS The family's land holdings suggest they kept livestock — sheep are specifically recorded as grazing on their island in Boston Harbour.

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Anne Hutchinson's consuming passion outside her domestic duties was theological study and discussion. She devoted her leisure to hosting and leading the conventicles — the sermon-study groups — that would ultimately bring about her downfall.

 Her work as a midwife was both a vocation and a social role that brought her into intimate contact with the women of the colony. (2)

SCIENCE AND MATHS She possessed significant medical knowledge for her time, practicing as a midwife and using herbal remedies to treat the sick

TRIAL AND BANISHMENT Anne Hutchinson arrived in Puritan Massachusetts with the awkward habit of thinking for herself, which in seventeenth-century New England was rather like turning up to a hedgehog convention dressed as a balloon. At first she merely held meetings in her home to discuss sermons — which sounds harmless enough, like a church coffee morning with fewer digestive biscuits and more predestination. But Anne had the unnerving tendency to ask whether many of the colony’s ministers were preaching salvation by grace or salvation by good behaviour in a very expensive hat. This was not considered helpful.

Before long she had done something especially alarming: she had gathered a following. Worse still, she had gathered men who listened to her. In Puritan Boston this was almost certainly listed somewhere between witchcraft and livestock theft. The authorities called it the Antinomian Controversy. One suspects Anne might have called it “a bit of a row.”

By November 1637 the row had matured into a full-scale collision. She was hauled before Governor John Winthrop and the General Court, where the colony’s leading men arranged themselves around her with the united warmth of an Old Testament weather system. And there she was — one woman against magistrates, ministers and enough black hats to block out the sun.

John Winthrop presided over Hutchinson's trial in 1637 as both accuser and judge

For two days she fenced with them brilliantly. They accused her of slandering ministers; she parried. They accused her of unlawful meetings; she wriggled through. She even had the audacity to ask witnesses to swear that their memories were accurate — a deeply inconvenient request in any century. You can almost hear the scratching of quills, the clearing of Puritan throats, and Anne, calm as a woman asking where the marmalade is kept, dismantling accusation after accusation.

It was, for a brief glorious moment, going badly for the prosecution. And then — as human beings often do when winning — she said a little too much. She declared her certainty came by direct revelation from God. Now, among ordinary Christians this might provoke discussion, prayer, perhaps a discreet cough. Among seventeenth-century magistrates, it was rather like tossing a lit candle into the gunpowder shed.

Governor Winthrop pounced. “A woman not fit for our society,” he declared. One can almost imagine Anne raising an eyebrow. History records she demanded to know why she was banished. Winthrop’s reply — “The court knows wherefore” — has all the logical elegance of a parent saying, “Because I said so.” And off she went to prison.

If that had been the end, it would already have been remarkable. But the Puritans, being thorough, decided to try her all over again. In March 1638 she faced a church trial lasting nine hours, which makes modern committee meetings seem mercifully brief. Even her old ally John Cotton abandoned her. The ministers pressed her to recant. She did not.

When minister John Wilson cast her out and “delivered her unto Satan,” one suspects Satan, receiving the paperwork, looked slightly alarmed. Anne walked out unbowed. Better cast out than deny Christ, she said. It is difficult not to love her a little.

Then came exile. Through April snow she and her supporters trudged to the refuge of Roger Williams, and from that expulsion emerged Portsmouth in Rhode Island — a settlement founded, astonishingly, on the idea that people might disagree about God without imprisoning one another. Which, if you think about it, was a fairly revolutionary notion.

Her legacy grew larger than her judges could have imagined. She became a patron saint of troublesome consciences, a foremother of religious liberty, a deeply inconvenient prototype for women who refused to stay quiet. And perhaps most deliciously, centuries later, in 1987, Governor Michael Dukakis formally pardoned her — 349 years after banishment, which must surely rank among history’s more leisurely apologies.

The divine irony is that the men thought they were defending orthodoxy; instead they helped create arguments for freedom of conscience. They thought they were silencing a woman; instead they made her immortal. And Anne herself — formidable, exasperating, inspired Anne — was undone not by her enemies’ cleverness but by her own irrepressible honesty. She could not stop speaking what she believed.

Some people have a spiritual gift for hospitality. Some for teaching. Anne Hutchinson appeared to possess the gift of alarming powerful men. Which, properly understood, may be a ministry.

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Anne Hutchinson’s theology was, in essence, gloriously simple and therefore immensely troublesome. She believed salvation was entirely an act of God’s grace — not assisted by good behaviour, not polished up by respectable conduct, and certainly not issued over the counter by anxious clergymen in black hats. This was what she called absolute grace, though to the Massachusetts authorities it probably sounded more like absolute anarchy.

She had learned much of it from her mentor John Cotton, but then — as gifted pupils have an irritating habit of doing — she took the idea further than the teacher found comfortable. Cotton suggested grace could not be earned. Anne practically ran through the streets ringing a bell and announcing that any attempt to prove salvation by upright behaviour might be not just mistaken, but spiritually dangerous. This was not the sort of nuance seventeenth-century Puritans enjoyed over supper.

Her argument, if one dares reduce something so explosive to a sentence, was that only the inward witness of the Spirit — what she called an intuition of the Spirit — could give assurance of election. Not moral performance. Not dutiful piety. Not the sort of face one wore while listening to sermons. 

Her critics called this Antinomianism — literally being “against the law,” which sounds wonderfully sinister, like a theological outlaw galloping across the doctrinal frontier. What they feared was that if believers were under grace rather than law, moral chaos would follow. People might begin doing dreadful things, like disagreeing with ministers.

Anne’s actual point was subtler, though no less inflammatory: the truly redeemed soul was governed by God’s Spirit rather than by anxious rule-keeping. But subtle distinctions are often the first to perish in controversy. Her opponents heard, “The moral law does not bind the saved,” while Anne meant something closer to, “Good works are fruit, not currency.” History is full of arguments collapsing for want of better listening.

At her trial, pressed and cornered, she rose into language so fearless it still crackles. “You have no power over my body,” she told her judges, “neither can you do me any harm — for I am in the hands of the eternal Jehovah, my Saviour.” It is one of those sentences that makes modern courage look slightly underdressed. There she stood — surrounded by magistrates, theologians, and men deeply worried about order — calmly informing them they were not, in fact, in charge. One suspects this did not improve the atmosphere.

What fascinates one is how very inconvenient grace often is. We like grace when it forgives us after a bad Tuesday. We grow nervous when it begins ignoring our systems, hierarchies and moral scorecards. Anne seemed to grasp that grace was not merely generous. It was wild.

And perhaps that was her real offence. Not simply that she challenged Puritan orthodoxy, but that she believed God could reach souls without asking institutional permission. That idea has made religious people twitch for centuries. It still does. 

POLITICS Anne Hutchinson operated in a theocratic polity in which religion and civil government were inseparable, and her challenge to ministerial authority was simultaneously a political act. Her supporters, including Governor Henry Vane the Younger, were voted out of office in the May 1637 elections, after which the orthodox party moved swiftly against her. 

After her banishment, her husband William became a founding signatory of the Portsmouth Compact of 1638, one of the early documents of American democratic self-governance.  (2), (3)

SCANDAL The Antinomian Controversy of 1636–1638 was one of the greatest scandals in colonial American history — a theological dispute that shook a young colony's governing structures to their foundations. Anne was condemned to banishment as "a woman not fit for our society." Her miscarriage of a hydatidiform mole in 1638 was gleefully publicised by the Puritan authorities as divine judgment; John Winthrop wrote that "she brought forth not one, but thirty monstrous births or thereabouts," adding that "as she had vented misshapen opinions, so she must bring forth deformed monsters." (3)

MILITARY RECORD  The political fallout from the Antinomian Controversy had direct military consequences: some of her supporters refused to serve in the Pequot War of 1637 because the colony's chaplain for the expedition was the minister John Wilson, whom they regarded as a teacher of the false covenant of works.

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS During the winter of her imprisonment (1637–1638), Anne suffered from unusual weakness, throbbing headaches, and bouts of vomiting; historians have debated whether she was pregnant at the time or experiencing acute menopausal symptoms following twenty-five years of continuous pregnancies, deliveries, and nursing. 

In May 1638, following the extreme stress of her trials and her six-day march through snow, she suffered a hydatidiform mole — a failed pregnancy caused by a chromosomal abnormality most common in women over 45.

HOMES Anne spent her first fifteen years in Alford, Lincolnshire, before her family moved to London, where her father became vicar of St Martin Vintry. She and William lived in London after their marriage in 1612, then returned to Alford, before following John Cotton to Boston.

In Boston, the Hutchinsons built one of the largest houses on the Shawmut Peninsula — a two-storey timber-frame structure on a half-acre lot in what is now downtown Boston, which survived until the great fire of 1711. 

After her banishment, she settled in Portsmouth, Aquidneck Island (Rhode Island), and finally, following William's death in 1642, relocated to Pelham Bay on Long Island Sound in the Dutch colony of New Netherland.(2), (3)

TRAVEL Anne made one of the most consequential transatlantic voyages in early American history when she sailed from England to Massachusetts in 1634, aboard the Griffin. 

Her overland journey into exile in April 1638 — more than six days on foot through snow from Boston to Providence, then by boat to Aquidneck Island — was a remarkable feat of endurance for a woman in her late forties recovering from a difficult winter. (3)

DEATH In August 1643, Anne Hutchinson, six of her children, and other members of her household were killed by Siwanoy people during Kieft's War, a conflict between Dutch colonists and local Native American tribes in what is now the Bronx, New York. The only survivor was her nine-year-old daughter Susanna, who was taken captive and lived with the Siwanoy for several years. 

Some in Massachusetts publicly regarded the massacre as divine judgment; others recognised it as the tragic end of one of the most remarkable lives in early American history. 

She is believed to be buried in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. (2), (4)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Anne Hutchinson is the subject of the celebrated painting Anne Hutchinson on Trial by American artist Edwin Austin Abbey (1852–1911). 

She is depicted in a statue at the Massachusetts State House, erected in her honour, with an inscription calling her "a courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration." 

Statue of Anne Hutchinson at Massachusetts State House by Cyrus Edwin Dallin

She has been the subject of numerous biographies, most notably American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson (2004) by Eve LaPlante, a direct descendant. 

A river, a parkway, and multiple schools and streets across New England and New York bear her name.

ACHIEVEMENTS Anne Hutchinson co-founded what is now Portsmouth, Rhode Island, one of the earliest settlements built on a principle of religious tolerance in America. 

Her defiance of Puritan orthodoxy prefigured the principles of freedom of conscience that would later be enshrined in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. 

She is honoured by Massachusetts as "a courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration," and was formally pardoned by Governor Michael Dukakis in 1987. 

Anne Hutchinson remains one of the most important women in early American history — a pioneering advocate for both religious freedom and women's right to speak, teach, and lead.

Sources: (1) Wikipedia – Anne Hutchinson (2) National Women's History Museum (3) Britannica – Anne Hutchinson  (4) American History Central (5) Beliefnet – The Trial of Anne Hutchinson (6) Core Knowledge – Anne Hutchinson Biography (7) Old Stone Bank History of Rhode Island (8) Women of the Hall (9) Wikisource – New England Legends and Folk Lore (1910)

Saddam Hussein

NAME Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti. 

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Saddam Hussein was the fifth President of Iraq, a position he held for over two decades. He is famous for his brutal authoritarian rule, the nationalization of Iraqi oil, and leading his country through several major conflicts, including the Iran-Iraq War, the invasion of Kuwait, and the 1991 Gulf War. He is notoriously remembered for his use of chemical weapons against his own citizens and for being the primary target of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which ultimately led to his capture and execution.

BIRTH Saddam Hussein was born on April 28, 1937, in the village of Al-Awja, near Tikrit, in northern Iraq. (1)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Saddam was born into a peasant Sunni Arab family from the Al-Bejat clan of the Bedouin Al-Bu Nasir tribe. 

His father, Hussein Abd al-Majid, disappeared before his birth — possibly dying before Saddam was born. His mother, Subha Tulfah al-Mussalat, was so overwhelmed by her circumstances that she reportedly tried to abort the pregnancy and could not care for the infant Saddam. (1)

His stepfather, Ibrahim al-Hassan, treated Saddam harshly and, according to a CIA psychological profile, beat him regularly. His maternal uncle, Khairallah Talfah — a devout Sunni Muslim and veteran of the 1941 Anglo-Iraqi War who had served five years in prison for fighting the British — became the defining father figure in his life, and later the father of Saddam's wife. Saddam's name means "the fighter who stands steadfast." 

CHILDHOOD At around the age of 10, Saddam fled his family home and returned to live in Baghdad with his uncle Khairallah Talfah. Under his uncle's guidance, he attended a nationalistic high school in Baghdad where he was exposed to Arab nationalist ideas. Talfah was appointed Mayor of Baghdad during Saddam's time in power, though his notorious corruption eventually forced Saddam to remove him from office. 

Saddam in his youth as a shepherd in his village, near Tikrit, 1956

EDUCATION Saddam attended a nationalistic high school in Baghdad. After secondary school, he studied at an Iraqi law school for three years before dropping out in 1957 to join the Ba'ath Party.  Following his involvement in the 1959 assassination attempt on Prime Minister Qasim, he fled to Egypt and in 1962–1963 unsuccessfully pursued a law degree at Cairo Law School, where he also graduated from high school in 1961.

CAREER RECORD 1957 He joined the Ba'ath Party, a Pan-Arab group espousing Arab nationalism and socialism. 

1959 He participated in a failed Ba'athist attempt to assassinate Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim. Shot in the leg during the encounter, he fled to Syria and then Egypt. 

1963 Returned to Iraq after the Ba'athist-led Ramadan Revolution, but was later imprisoned in 1964 when the party lost power to Abdul Rahman Arif. 

1967 Escaped from prison and became a key leader in the Ba'ath Party’s underground organization. 

1968 Played a central role in the July 17 Revolution coup that brought the Ba'ath Party back to power. He became Vice President under General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr.

1979-2003, Formally took office as President of Iraq on July 16, 1979, after forcing al-Bakr to resign. He immediately purged the party of perceived rivals.

APPEARANCE Saddam was a tall man, standing 6 ft 2 in (188 cm), which was considered tall for an Arab. (3) 

Saddam addresses the Iraqi state television, in January 2001

He had dark brown eyes, and for most of his career dyed his hair black and maintained his trademark thick moustache, avoiding showing his age publicly — his aides printed his speeches in huge fonts so he would not need to be seen wearing reading glasses. (4) 

He had a tattoo of three small blue dots on his right hand, a traditional mark given to children in his village. (4) 

After his 2003 fall from power, he was captured with long grey hair and a grey beard, having lost weight during his time in hiding. (5)

FASHION Saddam dressed to project authority and versatility, appearing variously in tailored Western suits, military uniform, and the white keffiyah of a tribal Arab. (5) 

He suffered agonizing foot pain caused by his insistence on wearing small, tight shoes out of vanity — footwear that disfigured his feet, and whose resulting pain reportedly affected his temper and decision-making. (1)

CHARACTER Saddam was intelligent, ambitious, and ruthless from an early age, drawn to Arab nationalist ideology and political activism. (6) 

He dominated Iraqi politics for 35 years through an extensive personality cult and a feared secret police apparatus. Many Arabs regarded him as a resolute leader who challenged American imperialism, while many Iraqis — particularly Shias and Kurds — viewed him as a tyrant. 

He was capable, however, of a certain personal warmth: the American soldiers who guarded him in prison reportedly grew attached to him, and at his execution were distraught, feeling as though they had betrayed a close friend or family member. (1)

SPEAKING VOICE Saddam was a powerful and theatrical public speaker in the tradition of Arab nationalist oratory, capable of holding large crowds. His public speeches were heavily propagandized and broadcast across Iraqi state media. 

SENSE OF HUMOUR Saddam was not known for self-deprecating humour, but his US prison guards claimed that one of the few times he ever looked defeated was when they brought him the wrong breakfast cereal. (1)

RELATIONSHIPS Saddam's first marriage, in 1963, was to Sajida Talfah, daughter of his uncle Khairallah — making her both his first cousin and his wife, an arranged union negotiated when they were children. They had five children: sons Uday (1964–2003) and Qusay (1966–2003), and daughters Raghad, Rana, and Hala. Uday, originally Saddam's favourite son and groomed as a successor, fell out of favour due to erratic and violent behaviour. (7)

Saddam's affair with Samira Shahbandar became public in the late 1980s, and he reportedly married her secretly in 1986, while both were still married to their respective spouses. Saddam's brother-in-law Adnan Khairallah was vocal in protesting the dishonour to Sajida; he subsequently died in what was officially described as a "freak" helicopter accident, though one of Saddam's bodyguards later admitted he had planted explosives on the chopper at Saddam's orders. (7)

Saddam burned his son Uday's motor vehicle collection — consisting of hundreds of rare, luxury cars — as punishment after a shooting incident at a dinner party on August 7, 1995, in which six bodyguards were killed and Saddam's half-brother Watban Ibrahim al-Tikriti was seriously injured. (1)

MONEY AND FAME Saddam exercised total control over Iraq's financial resources, diverting significant sums through opaque networks of front companies. 

In 1980, the city of Detroit presented Saddam Hussein with a key to the city, after he donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to a local church — the gift reflecting a period when he was seen as a US ally in the region. 

In 2001, Saddam promised to donate $94 million (£73 million) to poor Americans, pointing out that 30 million people in the US were living below the poverty line.

Saddam and his family took approximately $1 billion from the Iraqi central bank in the hours before the first bombs fell on Baghdad at the start of the 2003 invasion. (1)

FOOD AND DRINK Saddam's favourite dish was masgouf — a traditional Iraqi meal of grilled carp spiced with salt and pepper.  He also had a particular fondness for Doritos and could reportedly eat a family-sized bag in ten minutes. (1)

Image by Chat GBT

MUSIC AND ARTS Saddam fostered an extraordinary personality cult through the arts. Innumerable statues, portraits, and murals of him filled Baghdad's streets and galleries; he needed a veritable army of sculptors and painters to meet the demand. His obsession with grand building projects recreated, among others, the palace of Nebuchadnezzar, giving scores of architects and craftsmen employment. (8) 

Baghdad's Music School, which trained students in classical ballet, folk music, and orchestral performance, operated under state patronage throughout his rule. 

LITERATURE Saddam wrote a novel in 2000, Zabiba and the King — an allegorical tale that was unsurprisingly a bestseller across Iraq and was incorporated into the school curriculum. 

Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea was one of his favourite books; he reportedly admired it because it was about "struggling against overwhelming odds with courage, perseverance and dignity." (1)

NATURE While in prison awaiting trial, Saddam tended a small garden during his daily exercise period, carefully tending bushes, shrubs, and a palm tree surrounded by a circle of white stones — a habit noted for its irony given that he had overseen one of the worst acts of ecocide in modern history: the deliberate draining of the Mesopotamian Marshes. After the 1991 Shia uprising, his regime diverted the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to drain the marshes — once the third-largest wetland in the world — reducing them by over 90% by 1993, displacing more than 200,000 Marsh Arabs.

PETS Saddam's eldest son Uday was notorious for keeping lions and tigers in private enclosures at his palace — animals he reportedly used to intimidate and threaten enemies. After the 2003 invasion, American soldiers discovered the abandoned big cats at Saddam's palace complex and adopted them as unofficial mascots, naming the male lion Brutus.

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Saddam was an avid reader and a prolific writer. He also had a passion for collecting rare and luxury automobiles, a passion shared — and then destroyed — by his son Uday, whose entire collection Saddam had burned as punishment in 1995. (1) 

He was an enthusiastic builder and architectural patron, commissioning grand palaces throughout his rule. 

Saddam was a keen swimmer. On September 16, 1997, he was photographed swimming the width of the Tigris River near his birthplace of Tikrit — a feat staged as part of his personality cult to project an image of physical health and vigour. His many palace complexes were equipped with large swimming pools, some of which became famous after American soldiers commandeered them following the 2003 invasion.

SCIENCE AND MATHS Saddam oversaw Iraq's development of chemical and biological weapons programmes during his time as vice president and president, and in the 1980s authorised the use of chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians and Iranian forces. 

He also pursued a nuclear weapons programme, which suffered a decisive setback when Israel destroyed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in an air strike in 1981. 

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Saddam was a secular Ba'athist and a Sunni Muslim by background, but his governance was broadly secular. He espoused Ba'athism — a synthesis of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism. In the late 1990s, however, as his rule became increasingly embattled, he launched the Faith Campaign, an Islamist agenda for Iraq that saw him cultivate a more devout public persona. 

In an extraordinary devotional act, he spent two painstaking years in the late 1990s drawing 27 litres (57 pints) of his own blood and using it as ink to transcribe the entire Qur'an — all 336,000-plus words. Since his overthrow, no one has known what to do with it: it is a sin to have written the Qur'an in blood, but it is equally a sin to destroy any copy of the Qur'an. (1)

PRESIDENCY When Saddam Hussein formally took power on July 16, 1979, he did so with the brisk efficiency of a man rearranging a filing cabinet — though in this case the folders screamed. He eased aside the ageing Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who had been serving increasingly as a ceremonial presence, then staged one of the grimmer political performances of the 20th century: a televised Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party gathering in which he read aloud the names of supposed traitors. Twenty-two were executed, some by their own comrades, a method of fostering loyalty that was both theatrical and chillingly efficient. Saddam simultaneously made himself President, Prime Minister, and head of the Revolutionary Command Council — a tidy accumulation of titles suggesting he was not keen on delegation.

He governed through a vast lattice of intelligence agencies and secret police, where dissent tended to have a short and unhappy shelf life. Key positions were concentrated among Sunni Arabs, despite their minority status, and Saddam cultivated a personality cult of operatic proportions: portraits on buildings, statues in squares, slogans on walls — a man could scarcely buy bread without being reminded who was in charge. Yet amid the menace was a paradox. Saddam also pursued real modernization. Iraq’s oil industry, nationalized under the Ba’ath in 1972, funded free healthcare, mass literacy campaigns, electrification, roads, and social programs, including comparatively progressive openings for women. Like many strongmen, he seemed to believe it entirely reasonable to build schools in the morning and prisons in the afternoon.

His ambitions stretched beyond Iraq. He wanted to eclipse Egypt as the Arab world’s leading power and dominate the Gulf, goals that led to ruinous wars. In 1980 he launched the Iran–Iraq War, an eight-year bloodbath that consumed lives and treasure on a near-industrial scale, ending largely where it began. Two years later came the invasion of Kuwait, which triggered the Gulf War and brought a US-led coalition crashing down on Iraqi forces in a campaign so swift it must have seemed, to Saddam, indecently abrupt. Afterward, Shia and Kurdish uprisings were suppressed with characteristic brutality, producing massacres and waves of refugees.

The 1990s brought sanctions, economic collapse, and a slow erosion of the state he had built. After the September 11 attacks, the United States claimed Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction — claims later discredited, though they became the rationale for the 2003 invasion. Baghdad fell in April. Saddam, who had once appeared on murals in heroic pose beside lions and palm trees, was discovered in December hiding in a cramped underground chamber near Tikrit — a descent from imperial grandeur to something almost absurdly small. It had the bleak irony history occasionally specializes in.

POLITICS Saddam joined the Ba'ath Party in 1957 and made himself its dominant force in Iraq over the following two decades. His political goals as president were to supplant Egypt as leader of the Arab world and to achieve hegemony over the Persian Gulf. (9) 

He was a leading opponent of the 1978 Camp David Accords and hosted the Arab League summit that condemned Egypt for pursuing peace with Israel. (

He championed women's rights and education domestically — by the 1980s, women made up 46% of all teachers, 29% of doctors, and 40% of the civil service in Iraq — while simultaneously operating one of the most repressive state security systems in the Middle East. 

SCANDAL The Halabja chemical attack of March 16, 1988, in which the Kurdish town of Halabja was struck with mustard gas and nerve agents killing between 3,200 and 5,000 people, stands as one of the worst chemical weapons attacks in modern history and was part of the broader genocidal Anfal campaign against the Kurds. 

The 1990 invasion of Kuwait — which Saddam justified by accusing Kuwait of slant-drilling Iraqi oil reserves — triggered the Gulf War and years of crippling UN sanctions. (

The 2003 US-led invasion, premised on the claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, subsequently proved to be based on false intelligence. 

Saddam's regime was estimated to have been responsible for the murder or disappearance of between 250,000 and 290,000 of his own people. 

MILITARY RECORD Saddam was not a professional military officer by training but rose to the rank of general in the Iraqi armed forces in 1976. 

He led Iraq through two major wars: the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988) and the Gulf War (1991). As vice president he oversaw Iraq's defeat of the Kurdish insurgency in the Second Iraqi–Kurdish War (mid-1970s). 

He authorized the use of chemical weapons against both Iranian forces and Kurdish civilians during the Anfal campaign. 

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Saddam suffered from severe, chronic foot pain caused by his vanity-driven insistence on wearing shoes that were too small and too tight, which over time disfigured his feet. The pain was said to affect his temper and, reportedly, his judgement and decision-making. (1)

HOMES Saddam commissioned dozens of grandiose presidential palaces across Iraq during his rule, including a reconstruction of the ancient palace of Nebuchadnezzar. (8)

He owned dozens of lavish palaces throughout Iraq, including the "Victory Over America" Palace, commissioned in 1991 but never finished due to the 2003 bombing. (1) 

Former palace of Saddam Hussein atop a hill overlooking Babylon, By David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada 

At the end of his rule, he was reduced to hiding in a series of safe houses before being discovered in a cramped underground "spider hole" — a hole barely large enough for a man — at a farmhouse in ad-Dawr, near Tikrit. (1)

TRAVEL Saddam made rare trips abroad during his rise to power. He visited Spain in December 1974, at the invitation of Francisco Franco, and toured Granada, Córdoba, and Toledo. In September 1975, he met French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac in Paris, cementing close trade ties with France. 

Earlier in his life, he spent several years in exile in Damascus and Cairo. 

DEATH On December 13, 2003, Saddam Hussein was discovered hiding in an underground "spider hole" at a farmhouse in ad-Dawr, near Tikrit, at approximately 8:30 PM Iraqi time, in an operation called Operation Red Dawn. He was subsequently tried by the Iraqi High Tribunal for crimes against humanity, specifically the massacre of 148 Shi'a Muslims in the town of Dujail in 1982. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. (1) 

He was hanged on December 30, 2006, at 6:05 AM, Iraqi time. He refused to wear a hood during his execution. The American soldiers guarding him had grown attached to him during his captivity; at his execution, they were reportedly distraught, feeling as though they had betrayed and murdered a close friend or family member. (1)

He was buried the following day at his birthplace of Al-Awja in Tikrit, Iraq, two miles from the graves of his sons Uday and Qusay Hussein. 

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA  Saddam Hussein was the subject of an intense state-sponsored personality cult throughout his rule, appearing on countless murals, statues, portraits, and monuments across Iraq. (8) 

He featured prominently in international news coverage for over two decades. His trial and execution were broadcast globally. 

He was the subject of South Park's recurring parody portrayal as a bumbling villain. 

He was portrayed in various films and satires, most notably in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut and the comedy The Dictator (which was loosely inspired by his novel)

ACHIEVEMENTS Nationalized Iraq's oil industry in 1972, generating massive revenue for the state and transforming the Iraqi economy. 

Oversaw one of the fastest literacy drives in the Arab world, winning a UNESCO award for Iraq's education campaign. 

Introduced free healthcare and universal free education in Iraq, raised social services and farming subsidies to levels unparalleled in the region, and brought electricity to nearly every city in the country. 

Granted women full suffrage and the right to run for political office in 1980, and passed labour laws guaranteeing equal pay, six months of paid maternity leave, and legal protections against harassment.

Signed the 1975 Algiers Agreement with Iran, temporarily settling longstanding border disputes. 

Sources: (1) Encyclopaedia of Trivia – Saddam Hussein (2) Wikipedia – Saddam Hussein (3) Celebriot – Saddam Hussein Physical Stats (4) The Independent – The Life and Times of Saddam Hussein (5) ABC News – Saddam Has Changed Appearance (6) Young Pioneer Tours – Saddam Hussein Biography (7) All That's Interesting – Saddam Hussein's Wife Sajida Talfah (8) YouTube – Saddam Hussein's Artistic Legacy (2002) (9) Britannica – Saddam Hussein